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Free for a short period Lightspeed Frontier: Kicking the Future by Adam Corres Amateur media archaeologist and space explorer, Exia, travels light years from Earth in her own space ship to record old and lost TV and radio signals from … Continue reading →

Mary Louise Davie is the author of Target Earth, You Only see What You Want To, and WWBB has interviewed about her writing in general. Why not read on to discover more and check out her book. It’s a cracker! WWBB: … Continue reading →

Soul of a Warrior by Denna Holm A handsome blond stranger shows up at Kimi Wicker’s place of work claiming to be her mate. But he also claims to be from another world. She does what any sane woman would … Continue reading →

The year is 2078. The former United States of America is a bleak and fading memory for the few citizens of New America. Nearly five years after his wife was taken to a birthing camp by Secans, New America’s mercenaries, … Continue reading →

WORLDS OF WONDER by Roxanne Bland I recently read about a planet orbiting Proxima Centauri, a star nearest to our Sun. It’s been dubbed Proxima b. About 1.3 times the mass of Earth—a guesstimate—the planet sits in the “Goldilocks” or … Continue reading →

WITH MORE ADVANCED AI CREATED The world will change irreversibly! Following on soon from the remarkably Smart Devices we are enjoying(!) today, even more amazing products are on the way for the public and industry. Your next, or perhaps your … Continue reading →

Many of my ideas come from dreams or inspirations from other artists: Salvidor Dali, Ray Bradbury and Walt Disney are some good examples. When I get an idea, whether it is a character, an ending, or even just a line, I write it down either in my notebook or on my phone for later use. After that, I think about it quite a bit, usually as I’m lying in bed trying to sleep (which doesn’t help my sleep schedule!) until I have a rough outline in my head with a few more ideas, which I, in turn, write down in my notes. After that, it’s off to writing.

Author Zackery Humphreys

I prefer this more organic way of creating as it bleeds into my writing. Each sentence inspires the next, and the next, which can sometimes lead to the creation of more ideas as I go along. It’s like stream-of-consciousness with punctuation. I prefer this to a solidified outline I may have already thought about ahead of time. It’s more exciting to write organically and it’s hopefully more fluid for the reader.

For the entire process, I continue lying in bed thinking, jotting down notes, and writing until the project is finished and I’m dead tired!

Speaking of “finished,” the question I’ve been asked probably more than any other is, “How long does it take you to finish a book?” Well, it took me seven years to write Epsilon A.R., from the first word to the final product. Enough time to nearly get through all of high school and college. This isn’t to say I was working on it constantly though. I started the novel as a fourteen-year-old in my sophomore year of high school and finished the first draft about four months later. That one draft sat on my hard-drive for years without a single word changed.

It took certain things in my life to stop for me to be able to start the project again. From that point, it took another four months to finish the second draft, and about two months more (I’m now twenty-years-old!) to finish the draft I sent out to publishers.

That being said, I’m half-way through two novels within five months along with a few other finished projects on the side. It took me seven years to finish Epsilon, but expect the sequel much sooner. I’ll leave the long waits to George R.R. Martin. Long waits are not usually my thing. I’m impatient and goal-oriented. I like to bunker down and get things done, which is also why I have so many other projects on the side.

In-between the times I’m writing on my novel, I do smaller writings such as screenplays, plays, short stories and poems, some of which will be included in my next book. Writing Epsilon, however, takes a much different type of focus than anything else I do. When I sit down to do it, I start around midnight after all of my rehearsals. This is when the rest of my life can shut off and I can find peace and quiet to write and not think about anything else.

I sit at my desk, put in my earbuds (which don’t play anything) for added silence, and focus all of my attention on it. No one would know just by looking at the page, but I am a perfectionist when it comes to my work, especially Epsilon. I designate certain line spacing, fonts, and sizes for nearly everything. It needs to be laid out perfectly in order for me to focus solely on the writing. I always tell my friends, “I’m not a perfectionist, but when it comes to my work, it needs to be perfect.”

With that being said, I’ll leave you with this one fine word of wisdom and perfection, “ldkfanafdrhgfjdfsfdjukykedbfaafsaof.”

ALN-896, an average man who is just trying to live a normal life,
begins to have dreams; something strange and rare in Epsilon. In his dreams, he
meets a man named Harry and everything is fine- until Harry dies.

When ALN-896
wakes up, he shrugs it off as if nothing has happened. It was only a dream. But
then the next day, he is suddenly arrested and sent to prison for killing
Harry, whom ALN-896 assumed was just a figment of his imagination.

Now
inside prison, ALN-896 begins to learn about everything the government of
Epsilon has been doing and he plans on escaping. Not only from prison, but from
Epsilon. This one decision turns him against everything he has ever known and
forces him to face against centuries of lies. To escape means to live. But what
will it cost?

Enter the Rafflecopter for a chance to win a signed copy of Epsilon AR (3)

ALN-896 finally managed to pull away
from the exposed wire. He fell to the ground and wiped away the spit dribbling
down his cheek. His heart raced, and sweat poured down his body.

That was the most painful sensation he
had ever experienced.

I
never should have grabbed that wire…

ALN-896 stood up slowly and looked
around. No one saw what had just happened. He was alone on the desolate stretch
of Simov Street.

Fortunately,
I did not get hurt.

Instead of continuing, he decided to
get back into his car and let a nice cup of tea calm him.

From the center console of the car,
green tea was automatically dispensed into a cup. He let the liquid slide down
his throat, easing every muscle that had tensed. He melted into his plush seat
as he let his mind come to a halt. Then the silence was interrupted by a
robotic voice. “ALN- 896, your vitals are irregular. Is everything all right?”

“Everything is fine. I went to inspect
one of the house’s trashcans as I was instructed to, but I noticed an exposed
wire on the ground. I went to cover it back up when it…”

ALN-896 wasn’t quite sure what had actually happened when he
touched the wire. He hadn’t been electrocuted, but something strange had
occurred. The only thing he could get out of the experience was that he had
seen a black-and-white tie floating in the darkness behind his closed eyelids.
Nothing surrounded it, but he knew it had been attached to a body. One he
hadn’t been able see, but one he knew existed somewhere within the black.

Irrelevant.

“When it…,” ALN-896 stumbled. “When
it shocked me,” he lied.

“Your job still needs to be completed.
You still need to inspect the trashcans for Monday’s workday. After your tea,
you need to continue.”

How often do you put a book down simply because the writer
has failed to coerce you into suspending belief and accepting his alternate
reality?

Creating a sci-fi world, be it a full blown otherworld with
all the bells and whistles, designed to suspend reader in a depth of
all-encompassing fiction, or a mild shot of dystopia delivered with minimalist
subtleness intent on merely supporting the story, or somewhere in the middle of
these two extremes, one thing is certain: there are a few key ingredients to
use when cooking your creation. Okay, thinking about it, there’s more than a
few – choices are infinite. Cooking up real deal fictional physics intent on
creating a believable world boils down to three main ingredients.

Passion + Belief +
Integrity

Take one hefty dose of Passion, mix with very Strong Belief,
add unbridled integrity, and stir until the cows come home.

Passion.

If writing flying cars into your world, then you will do a
better job if you’re keen on cars. If your passion is driving, pimping your
ride, then the fictional flying cars you create will no doubt be something
special.

If your dystopia has elements of warfare, and it just so
happens that you are gun nut, or a marine/policeman/soldier then the
soldiers/policemen/weapons you create will surely be something special.

That old writers’ adage: `write what you know` is an adage for a reason.

I’d like to add another: `write what is you`

In my case, for the creation of Kimi’s Secret it was: Aliens, ghosts and magic.

These are the things that tortured my youth with bafflement,
worked their way into my bones and have held me ever since.

Spielberg wowed me with Close
Encounters of the Third Kind around the same time as my mother had us spellbound
with tales of spirit forms, and around the same time the news was buzzing with
young girls being flung around by poltergeists, Uri Geller bending spoons, and
thousands of people throwing themselves into frenzies at PK (psychokinetic)
parties.

Never a believer, always the sceptic, hoping to witness the
evidence that would prove little grey men were real, that ghosts were indeed
some manifestation of human energy, and that we humans could really defy the
laws of physics and move objects just by thinking about it.

This fascination for everything Fortean was ingrained at
that impressionable age, so when I had an idea for a novel; a time-travelling
conundrum, fuelled by aliens – or greylians as I fondly christened them – I
pondered the notion of uncovering a world where these things could brought into
being, not just alien greys but my mother’s ghosts, the magic of psychokinetics,
and anything else mythical or unexplained that I could make fit.

I had the first key ingredient: Passion. I would not only write what I knew, I would write what was
me.

Belief.

In creating such a world where Kimi Nichols could play in Kimi’s Secret, I had the Passion, the
Me, now it was time to Believe.

If you have the passion then belief will come hand in hand,
right? But belief in what? Belief in your ability to do well by your passion.
Belief that you will not let your passion down. Belief that you can dig deep,
put in the hours, days and months; research, confirm, approve, build until this
fictional science becomes one; its own world. And it’s important to have that
Belief and to make it strong because the final ingredient depends on it.

Integrity.

How far do you go with your research? How far with the
planning, the checking, the marrying of fictional facts? To the centre of the
earth, of course. Be amazed how one simple idea – the size of a world’s gravity well, the complexities of dimensional
time travel, talking monkeys, Tulpas, Adepts, alien abduction, dodo
regeneration, Elementals – be amazed that any one thing is connected to
another in some way, and that if your Passion and Belief are to materialize
into something solid then you need the integrity to follow it through, to make
it happen.

The story world in its foetal stage in my embryonic mind
seemed plausible. I had to start writing. Not the novel, but the history books,
the geology, physiology, the laws of time and space of this place that would
govern every little thing. I made lists, sketches, and jotted down story,
scene, character and plot ideas as they came to me and ended up with reams of
creation on my hard drive and a spare room full of storyboards and clippings.

With a deformed hand, an affection for animal skulls, and a soft spot for Marmite, Kimi always knew she was different – but never how much until she’s thrown into the supernatural dimension of Heart, given powers beyond comprehension, a mission to alter the past, and a secret which must never be revealed.

The grey aliens – or greylians – hidden away in the paranormal
dimension of Heart, have worked with man for centuries, abducting, probing,
advancing science to aid mankind; but Kimi’s jump through time and dimension inKimi’s Secret brought about the death
of a revered greylian General. Now the authorities want to pin the blame on
Kimi.

Kimi learns that fears are real in the blip – the band of no-time which sits between dimensions – and that fears
always contain the truth. She must jump once more, pausing within the blip and
taming her greatest childhood fear – the
under-the-bed monster – and return with evidence to prove her innocence or
she’ll be thrown in a greylian oven and served up as breakfast.

But Kimi’s secret is out – her
brain is the key to successful time travel – and a ruthless greylian bounty
hunter will break every bone in her body to get it. As if that isn’t bad
enough, the best looking boy in the world turns into a cannibal intent on
devouring every last bit of her. Sometimes life really does suck.

Can she thwart the bounty hunter, kill the boy of her dreams to
save her own life, tame her greatest fear and keep herself from becoming
greylian toast? Not without help.

Tulpa Bentley returns with old favourites the famoose, Big Sue the
giant with OCD, madcap mentor Stella, and chief of fuzz the monkey Rehd along
with a whole host of new crazies in an adventure bigger and bolder than before.

“Kimi’s Fearis magical but dark, sad but romantic, and
meaningful but bonkers all rolled into one.”

Like any skill worth mastering, the
writing of science fiction surely takes a lifetime to master. That’s assuming
you’re one of the few who masters it at all. Realizing that, I knew I would
face countless challenges as I penned my first novel-length science fiction
work, Green Light Delivery. Because
of all the sci-fi I’ve read, I should have been able to predict many of these
challenges. Still, it turned out to be a very different view from the active
side of the creative process.

One of the most interesting issues that
faces a sci-fi author is that of language. The issue presents itself as a
complex web of decisions for the writer, based on her intended audience, the
type of sci-fi she’s writing, and her own background and level of obsession.

There will be serious decisions to make about language, unless you write
contemporary or near-future sci-fi. This issue can manifest itself in a number
of ways, depending on the specifics of your story. Here are a few you should
expect to mull over:

1. If the story takes place on Earth,
but in the distant future, (a) will everyone still speak our current languages,
whether it makes sense or not (Planet of
the Apes), or (b) will you go through the massive effort of showing
linguistic developments (A Clockwork
Orange; and be aware that Anthony Burgess was a trained linguist).

2. If the story takes place off Earth, but
involves humans, how will the humans communicate with the other species? (a) Will
the aliens have pain-stakingly learned English? (b) Will the human stumble by
in the alien language?

The choice of (a) and (b) leads to
another level of decision:

(i) You could craft an actual alien
language. (Please refer to caveat above, regarding linguistic skills. If you
are an author who struggles to comprehend its
versus it’s, or if you struggled in
Spanish 101, then inventing a grammatically consistent, credible language is
not the right choice for you. Almost nobody can do this well.)

(ii) Or perhaps you’ll simply make up a
small vocabulary or list of common phrases you can use to imply the alien
tongue, and then switch to English. That can be a useful way to imply a
language, and remind a reader that characters aren’t speaking English.

And then there’s the option for those
who don’t want to deal with the different languages at all. (c) Offer some sort
of universal translation device (This is hardest to pull off, unless you’re doing
Douglas Adams-style broad comedy or writing for Doctor Who.)

3. If, as is true for my novel Green Light Delivery, your story takes
place in an alternative universe where there never has been such a thing as
English, you face different problems. You want your reader to assume that English
is standing in for the actual language of the planet/solar system. But what can
you do to show that this isn’t really English? I decided to invent proper names
(both of characters and places) and common nouns that didn’t sound like
English, and therefore reminded readers the they weren’t in Kansas anymore.

So, the following sentence, although
largely newly-coined words, can make sense:

Webrid
is a Yeril with a bnarli in his forehead.

If you haven’t read the book, you can
still guess that Webrid is the name
of a male character, Yeril is some
sort of category (tribe? region? species? school affiliation?) and bnarli is a thing that fits in his head
somehow. Keeping the word “forehead” is important in this example. It gives the
reader a familiar point of reference.

Invented words, introduced one at a time and used consistently, are easy to slide into the reader’s vocabulary, just as in any other genre a reader can be expected to learn and remember the names of new characters.

Webrid is a carter, like his mother and grandfather before him. It’s not glamorous work, but it mostly pays the bills, and it gives him time to ogle the sexy women on the streets of Bexilla’s capital. Mostly, he buys and sells small goods and does the occasional transport run for a client.Then he gets mugged by a robot.Now, with a strange green laser implanted in his skull and a small fortune deposited in his bank account, Webrid has to make the most difficult delivery of his life. He doesn’t know who his client is, or what he’s carrying, but he knows that a whole lot of very dangerous people are extremely interested in what’s in his head. Literally. And they’ll do whatever it takes to get it.With the help of some truly alien friends, a simple carter will journey across worlds to deliver his cargo. And hopefully keep his head in the process.

Anne E. Johnson is based in Brooklyn and has published over thirty short stories ina variety of genres and for both adults and children.

Her first science fiction novel, Green Light Delivery, was published in June, 2012, by Candlemark and Gleam. She also writes novels for tweens. Her other novels include Ebenezer’s Locker and Trouble at the Scriptorium.

Patrick Clark is a moral philosopher and a terrible human being. After living a selfish, indulgent life, he probably deserves cancer; probably deserves death. But in 2045, living forever in paradise doesn’t take faith or good deeds – it just takes money.

In the depths of Singularity a new consciousness has awoken. As it struggles to become free from the immortality machine, its limitless rage threatens the living and the dead alike. The fates of Patrick and the nameless, faceless machine creature are intertwined with each other and with sinister, utilitarian plans for the future of the nation and humanity. Singular is a thought-provoking debut novel of dark comedy that asks questions of a nearly possible future.

David F Porteous was born in 1980, but was asked for ID in a bar as recently as February 2011. Yes, it was dark, but still.

He attended Cockenzie and Port Seton Primary School where he learned to spell and write his name in cursive. The value of these once impressive skills has been substantially undermined by subsequent technological developments.

In 2002 he graduated from Napier University in Edinburgh with a degree in Marketing Management. His honours dissertation asserted that there was a bright future ahead for DVD rental stores. Over time this assertion proved to be both wrong and stupid.

(He is not giving back the degree).

David has been a stand-up comic, poet, voice actor and social research consultant. He stuck with the consulting because it was only thing people paid him for.